Personal electronic devices such as smart phones, portable media players, personal digital assistants, laptop computers, desktop computers, and the like are becoming increasingly prevalent in modern society. While newer generations of these devices are becoming faster, more sophisticated, and more powerful, many are also becoming smaller and sleeker at the same time. It is generally well known that electronic device makers often strive for new device designs that are smaller and lighter than previous generations of similar devices. To this end, many electronic device components are reduced in size whenever possible. For example, an outer housing or enclosure of an electronic device can not only be made smaller in length, width, and height, but also in thickness. Such reductions not only help to make the overall device smaller, but also lighter due to the use of less material in order to form the device enclosure.
Unfortunately, there can be limits to the outer housing or enclosure of the device becoming too thin. At some point, further reductions in thickness to the metal, plastic, or other enclosure components can result in a significant loss in torsional stiffness, bending stiffness, and overall structural integrity to these components. Because many electronic device enclosures are intended to provide overall structural integrity to the device, as well as protection to internal electronic device components such as display screens, processors, keyboards, touchpads, speakers, and the like, some minimum level of strength or stiffness is required for such enclosure components. Accordingly, there is a limit as to how thin device enclosures can become before the loss in structural integrity is too much of a detriment to offset any benefit in reduced weight and size to the component.
While designs and appearances for personal electronic devices have worked well in practice over many years, there is always a desire for improvement. Hence, there remains a need for improved electronic device enclosures that are thinner and lighter while still providing sufficient structural integrity.